Page 18 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

8 Chapter 1

Media helps determine what local, national, and international "problems" re-
ceive the most attention, and which will be deemphasized or neglected Main-
stream media controls in large part what Americans see, when they see it, and
how they see it. What media outlets choose to report and to ignore play a major
role in the formation of viewers' opinions and ideologies.

The Power of News:
Examining the Nexus Between Media and Public Opinion

A number of academic studies spanning back to the late 1960s and early 1970s
sought to examine the effects of media coverage within an experimental, scien-
tifically-oriented research approach, in order to demonstrate the media's ability
to influence public opinion concerning important domestic and foreign policy
plans and initiatives. Among the first were Donald Shaw and Maxwell
McCombs, who gained notoriety after publishing the results of their study of
media coverage of the 1968 presidential election.
In their study, Shaw and McCombs sought to demonstrate media power
over the public's perceptions of political candidates, as well as media influence
over voter behavior. Based upon their interviews and experiments with one-
hundred television viewers, Shaw and McCombs determined that the media
played a vital role, not so much in "telling people what to think, but what to
think about" regarding important campaign issues and other matters.' This con-
clusion has also been reinforced by the earlier work of prominent media scholar
Bernard Cohen, in his much-cited work, The Press and Foreign ~olic~?
Drawing from Cohen, Shaw and McCombs' conclusions "suggest[ed] a
very strong relationshp between the emphasis placed on different campaign
issues by the media and the judgments of voters as to the salience and impor-
tance of various campaign topics."3 McCombs specifically concluded that "the
media are the major primary sources of national political information [for the
American public]; for most, mass media provide the best-and only easily
available approximation of ever changing political realities.''
Other studies revealed similar results concerning the power of media to de-
termine what issues the public views as important. For example, one Gallup Poll
conducted from 1964-1970, focusing on three prominent weekly news maga-
zines-Time, Newsweek, and US. News & World Report-found that there was
a strong correlation between the most commonly focused upon themes in these
three papers and public perceptions of what issues constituted "the most impor-
tant problem" for the nation during those same years.5 Such research shows that,
as institutions with mass appeal, media outlets have traditionally served as a lens
through which Americans view the major challenges facing the country.
The studies above had a major effect on the communications field in the
decades following their release. As James Dearing and Everett Rogers explain,
the 1968 presidential-media study "set off a research paradigm adopted primar-
ily within mass communications studies, although it was also appropriated to
varying degrees by a number of political scientists, sociologists, and other aca-